Two New FWO Project Grants!
A massive week for the growth of the lab as we received news of generous funding support from the Research Foundation Flanders - FWO in the form of not 1 but 2 project grants (the maximum permitted per PI)!
1️⃣ In the INTERVIR project co-funded by the F.R.S. - FNRS and Research Foundation Flanders - FWO under the 🇪🇺 WEAVE agreement we will work with the team of Herve Vanderschuren at University of Liège to use proteomics to study how plant viruses 🦠 interact with their insect vectors and hijack their host plant cell's molecular machinery. The goal is to discover new targets for engineering virus resistance in the important tropical crop Cassava. To us, this project has special significance as it shows that the scientific community and funders in Europe can be persuaded to support cutting-edge science to benefit the Global South as well as European agriculture.
2️⃣ In our single-lab CHRONOPROX project, we will implement and develop new hashtag#proteomics tools to study how the plant circadian clock controls gene regulation in plants and enables them to measure the length of a day, keep time with the planet's rotation 🌍 and adapt to new environments with hashtag#climatechange. This is a more fundamental blue-sky project that will supercharge our efforts to discover a new way to engineer climate-resilient crops.
✈️ We were also privileged to receive a joint Research Foundation Flanders - FWO National Science and Technology Council Mobility Grant to strengthen our research partnership with Ting-Ying Wu's lab at Academia Sinica, Taiwan! 🇧🇪 🇹🇼
💶 This important funding injection into the lab's mission to develop hashtag#proteomics into a scalable tool for plant biology is also complemented by a multi-million euro large-scale infrastructure grant led by Bart Ghesquière that we were fortunate to receive earlier this year with Liesbet Temmerman and Johan(nes) Swinnen.
We can't wait to start working on these projects and recruit new team members (and their robot helpers 🤖 ) in the New Year! 🎆